Department of Energy ’s science chief announces her unexpected departure

After 22 months on the job, Asmeret Asefaw Berhe, director of the Department of Energy’s (DOE’s) Office of Science, is stepping down. Yesterday Berhe sent a letter to the office’s 815 employees saying her last day would be 28 March. With a budget of $8.2 billion, the office is the United States’s single largest funder of the physical sciences. Berhe, who was born in Eritrea and is the first person of color to direct the office, says in her letter that the job has been “the honor of my lifetime” and that she’s leaving with “pride in what we have accomplished, and a heavy heart filled with profound sadness and gratitude.” Berhe might be leaving out of frustration with the department’s senior leaders, say multiple former DOE employees who requested anonymity to protect professional ties. Berhe’s leadership of the Office of Science was greeted with enthusiasm and dismay by different research communities. When President Joe Biden nominated her in April 2021, she was a soil scientist at the University of California, Merced who had no experience leading big scientific collaborations or projects, which are the Office of Science’s bread and butter. Many of her colleagues in biogeochemistry and associated fields hailed her appointment as a signal that DOE science might turn away from legacy fields such as particle physics and nuclear physics and toward fields directly related to the looming climate crisis. But some physicists argued she was...
Source: ScienceNOW - Category: Science Source Type: news